In support of the Xilinx high speed serial initiative, Xilinx Design Services (XDS) offers a wealth of experience in developing high-speed serial I/O solutions. For example, XDS helped one of its customers cut costs by adopting a single chip Virtex-II Pro solution using the RocketIO multi-gigabit transceivers (MGT) instead of a dual chip approach using an FPGA in combination with a Standard Product High-Speed Transceiver chip set.

When a customer needs confirmation that the RocketIO MGT will perform according to their own specific requirements, XDS will conduct physical layer characterization. Physical layer characterization involves the building and reuse of embedded hardware/software systems on Virtex-II Pro devices to allow the measurement of such quantities as bit error rate, latency and resynchronization time. In order to carry out such measurements, XDS has special access to the various Xilinx characterization boards.

XDS can assist in partial reconfiguration of the RocketIO MGT. For example, it is common to require that electrical transmission characteristics vary from serial link to serial link depending on the distance of the link. Partial reconfiguration offers a way to avoid storing multiple bitstreams on a system. Instead, it allows each system's RocketIO configuration to be personalized using on-board switches or under software control. Additionally, partial reconfiguration can be used to switch a RocketIO channel from one physical standard to another without any service disruption on the unaffected channels.

In another early success, XDS designed, developed and delivered a verified proprietary, high-speed serial physical layer interface using RocketIO designed to address the customer's special system requirements. The customer was able to use existing higher-level protocol layers, which were already available from Xilinx, with a tailor-made physical layer that allowed them to develop their system long before high-speed serial physical layer standards became available.

XDS has provided a variety of other FPGA programmable systems solutions. XDS has the embedded software expertise necessary to deliver fully integrated and dynamically configurable systems. XDS also has extensive experience in designing many of the protocol layers for the various communications and interface protocol standards currently available or emerging in the electronics industry.